Voting in Little Earth, an essay on Nov 6 by Louise Erdrich

2:10 am - 11/11/2012

Little Earth of United Tribes is a Native-preference housing development within the larger city of Minneapolis, and it is where my daughter Persia and I have gone to work in the past two elections. In 2008 the weather was fine and with other people we excitedly roamed among the stucco duplex homes, canvassing, talking, helping new voters register. Minnesota has same-day registration. That year, two homeless people who wanted to vote registered. One woman had slept underneath a playground slide for months. That was her address. The other person had a certain tree. This year the weather is lousy—drizzly and cold. Instead of the muted hysteria of the last election, there is an impressive sense of organized determination.

For one thing, the T-shirts.

Muriel Thompson, of the Red Lake Nation in upstate Minnesota, has just voted, and now she is resting, a beautiful older round-faced lady with lively dark eyes. She is laughing and proud of her gray “Make Voting a Tradition” long-sleeved T. On it, three powwow dancers wait for a dancer in a voting booth. Only his moccasins, ankle bells, and fringed apron show beneath the curtain.

“This shirt means we’ve been thinking about the vote,” Muriel says. “Us, we take it seriously!” Muriel tells me that a neighborhood worker came around and gave her a cardboard feather. “One side the place we vote, and how to do it. You turn the feather around when you are done. Put it in your window. When I go home, I’ll turn my feather around.”

Little Earth’s polling station is a warm and well-kept old stone school across the street from the housing project. It shelters two Native-language-immersion pre-schools. Upstairs, the Ojibwe language classroom has a happy homemade air—a large papier-mâché tree (mitig), brilliant paper stars (anangoog) sewn together with yarn, an Ojibwe alphabet. Everything in the classroom is labelled in Ojibwe, and a weekly newsletter edited by a vibrant woman named Noodinensiikwe reports to parents the phrases that their children learn and use. Downstairs a KIDS VOTE booth is set up next to the Gross Motor Room. (Sign: “No Food in the Gross Motor Room.”) Children are clustered around two pretty Native twenty-somethings who are showing them how to fill out ballots. Minnesota votes with paper ballots—filling in ovals as in S.A.T. tests. At the end of the table there is a bowl of leftover Halloween candy.

A Somali woman in a neon orange veil, two Somali men in wool hats and suits, a grandmother and two children enter. This is their polling place, too. Minneapolis is home to large refugee populations—among them Hmong, Somali, and Eritrean people. This is where descendents of the original inhabitants of this continent and its latest immigrants vote side by side. Everything runs smoothly, there are no lines. A serious young pony-tailed Native election worker walks elders over from their houses to vote.

We walk over to the Little Earth offices to visit our friend, the Little Earth Vice President (and poet) Jay Bad Heart Bull, a charismatic Standing Rock/Oglala Sioux, and a former Obama supporter. This year, he is voting only on the two amendments on the ballot: voter I.D. and same-sex marriage. Why has Jay soured on Obama? Because the President allowed the Navy SEALs to associate our country’s greatest enemy—Osama Bin Laden—with Geronimo.

“Thanks, Obama, we’re still terrorists in your eyes,” Jay says.

I argue with Jay, reminding him of all the surprising things Obama has done for Indian Country—we agree that he’s been the best President in history when it comes to our people. Still, no vote. This Geronimo thing sits hard with many Native Americans. There is a reason most every movie and book about every war has an Indian in the narrative’s platoon. Jay, and every other Native person, it seems, has a close relative in the Armed Forces, and to be associated with America’s enemies is an insult to their service.

***

Memengwesi is one of three teachers in the immersion classroom. David is an Anishinabe, a University of Minnesota student, and wants to vote in Minneapolis. This will be his first vote, ever. He’s a handsome, quiet man with a shy smile, and he’s thrilled to vote this year. Why didn’t he last time?

“We used to live in the bush. Voting didn’t mean so much, but now we see it does. My parents (very traditional people) voted last year for the first time.”

As we are leaving Little Earth to find his polling spot, we walk to the parking lot. A man emerges from a curiously bumper-stickered car—“EVERY TRIBE, TONGUE, NATION, OR BUST!” He’s a smiley sandy man in a puffy blue vest. It is starting to rain, but he’s beatific.“What’s my bumper sticker about? I’m going everywhere to spread Christ! Why? I believe every tribe was created for His glory!”

He floats across the street to cast his vote.

We drive over to David’s polling spot, the Universalist Church in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood—a district of Young Scandinavian Upwardly Mobile Minnesotans. He brings his most recent bills in to the registration desk, but a sour woman with a stern attitude packs him off. These bills aren’t the right kind, although they came to his address. He needs to find someone to vouch for him.

“Valiant attempt,” she says as he walks away. It is more a sneer than a compliment. He’s deflated.

My daughter Persia won’t quit and goes back to the building to scare up someone to help. The first person in the small six-apartment building refuses, as does the second, although the polling place is only three blocks away and there are no lines. How non-Minnesotan!

They hop in the car, bound for Memengwesi’s reservation nearly two hours north. As Muriel said, they are serious about getting to vote.

***

Lynlake, a neighborhood roughly centered on the crossing of Lyndale and Lake Streets, is what Uptown used to be—a lively cluster of independent businesses, bike shops, cafés, coffee shops, and bars. My daughter’s martial-arts school is across from the V.F.W., the local polling station. To my astonishment, as I drive over in the dark to pick up my youngest daughter, I see what only occurs in Minnesota when the Vikings are playing well or a new Halo video game appears, as it did the night before: a line. This line stretches on and on into a freezing darkness with a cutting wind. The people standing in the line are young, most in thin hoodies. They are hopping up and down, checking their phones, dancing on numb feet, blowing on their fingers. I see in them my daughters, and as a mom I can’t help it. Those kids look low on grease. I buy a bunch of pizzas.

Passing out pizza, I find that there are people who’ve come early, waited an hour, left for work, but returned to stand for two more hours. A woman in wild fake white fur with a pink shawl grins as she finally reaches the V.F.W. awning, which cuts the wind. People may be pissed, but they are emphatically not leaving, even those huddled in blankets, or shaking in flannel shirts. Aside from the Presidential race, there are two initiatives on the ballot that have energized them—the same ones Jay is voting on. One is for voter I.D., the other is a same-sex-marriage amendment declaring marriage to be man/woman only. The wind cuts harder. A man in a parka grabs me—he’s one of my oldest friends in Minneapolis, and his son has worked at my bookstore, Birchbark Books. His dad puts him on the phone. I can hear the sob of exhaustion in his voice, the spent adrenaline. Nathan been working for a year to defeat the marriage amendment—he’s hoarse from phone calls, and now this is it. Eight o’clock. The polls close. Only the diehards who stuck in the line will be allowed to vote.

Meanwhile, Memengwesi and Persia are in the exalted state of those who’ve completed a quixotic mission. They have driven up 35 North to Hinckley, Minnesota, onto the Mille Lacs reservation. Behind the casino, down a tiny lightless road between pastures and harvested corn fields, they bump along and find Ogema Township Hall—only because an election worker has turned on his pickup’s lights in the yard. The hall itself, a dimly lighted antique country schoolhouse, is a world away from the city polls. The polling booths have handmade red-checked curtains, which match the window curtains. The poll is womaned by three serene white-haired little grandmothers, who have brought cupcakes, coffee, and crock pots of soup for voters who need sustenance after the dark drive. They efficiently register Memengwesi, who simply, with happy gravity, votes. The ladies are sweetly patient with three tough, mouthy, tattooed Native women who are outraged to find that felons can’t vote.

“Oh, it’s just part of the punishment, dear,” one grandma explains.

The women are not felons. Just standing up for felons. And voting means a great deal to them, too, otherwise they wouldn’t be in Ogema Township Hall. They cast their ballots a few minutes before the poll closes and the pickup truck’s owner douses the headlamps. I imagine, then, the three grandmothers sitting in the plain old schoolhouse like Fates, in a circle of light, sorting and hand-counting the ballots.

If you look at any electoral map, there are blue spots in every red state. Those spots are reservations. Native people vote the Democratic ticket, and in swing states, or close elections like the 2008 Senate race, which eventually went to Al Franken, those ace-in-the-hole votes can be crucial. Tonight, when we find out that Heidi Heitkamp is running a hot Senate race in our home state, North Dakota, and the last counties left to report contain the Fort Yates and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservations, we text and phone our joy. We can see those elderly ladies pursing their lips and totaling the count way out there in the boonies. And we know our people gave a new senator that last boost, over the top.

Huh. I...am of two minds on this. One, yes, i understand why the NA community doesn't like this. But i also know the military uses a lot of words simply because they're well known and/or difficult to mishear as code.

It doesn't make *me* think that they're comparing Geronimo to a terrorist, but that they're using his name to signal victory over an enemy - like his name is a war-cry or a victory shout. But then, as a kid, when we jumped off stuff we'd shout 'Geronimo!', so maybe it's just me.

Every time I read or see anything about people standing in long lines to vote and refusing to be moved, I bawl. This one was worse, because that's my home town. There should seriously be a 'do not read while wearing contacts/mascara/etc' warning on this.